September 7, 2012

TIFF '12: Ship of Theseus

***/****written and directed by Anand Gandhi

by Angelo Muredda The feature debut of Indian playwright (and
occasional soap writer) Anand Gandhi, Ship of Theseus puts its dramaturgical
origins up front. Gandhi's film begins with a philosophical conceit from
Plutarch--the question of whether a ship that's been repaired using parts
from other vessels can be considered the same ship at all--and workshops it
through three seemingly-disconnected stories set in modern-day Mumbai. All
three strands, which unfold like a series of one-act plays, are preoccupied
with the biological analogy of Theseus's broken-down ship, a leaky body that
needs an organ transplant to survive. And while the finale that brings them
together is unnecessarily tidy, the individual segments strike a fine balance
between humanism and intellectual rigor.

Though there
are some technical blips that lend the film an unfinished feel, this is
generally strong work for a neophyte. What's impressive is how each story
addresses the marching orders of the central paradox without sacrificing
characterization. It would have been easy, for instance, to bungle the opening
portrait of Aaliya (Aida El-Kashef), a blind photographer whose artistic
process involves shooting by instinct and developing the finished work through
a multi-step process of vectorizing and etching the image after her boyfriend
gives an account of what he sees in it. One pre-emptively cringes when she
appears, given the classically-inflected title, worrying that she'll be used as
Tiresias the blind seer reincarnated in Mumbai. It's a relief, then, that her
art is presented not as second-sighted action photography so much as
translation. Its reliance on contingent factors as disparate as her boyfriend's
feedback and the voiceover technology built into her camera makes a case for
how thoroughly prosthetics are already embedded into contemporary ways of
seeing, let alone recording things. In other words, her disability isn't
rendered equivalent to an old ship's rotten board but naturalized as part of a
larger worldview that sees interdependence as central to identity formation and
even work, at least in city life.

Gandhi takes
Aaliya's aesthetic ideology seriously, as he does the religious objections to
imbibing medicine put forth by dying monk Maitreya (Neeraj Kabi) in the second
section, and the moral quandary of aloof stock-trader and organ recipient
Naveen (Sohum Shah) in the third and probably trickiest. You could make the
case that Naveen's segment, the most substantial in narrative terms, warranted
its own film rather than its hasty incorporation here, and certainly it's not
obvious that all three stories needed to be woven together in the conventional
manner Gandhi settles on in order to make the point that Enlightenment ideas
about the upright individual don't hold much water. Still, this is a
thought-provoking film, rather like a lost, minor-key work from the
comparatively bombastic Krzysztof Kieślowski. Programme: City to City